Reply to post: Re: @AC

Yes, we need two million licences - DEFRA

NumptyScrub

Re: @AC

This is an idiotic statement. I've worked fairly extensively with Oracle and MySQL*. Oracle is certainly the more feature-rich, but for many applications there is little or no time penalty for using MySQL. The advantage may even be the other way, as you don't need the army of DBAs that seem to be part of every Oracle installation.

I think that statement was actually meant to imply that many people bandy about the term "free" without considering cost implications of the people required to implement and maintain the aforementioned "free" software. You can move from an Oracle DB backend to a MySQL backend, but unless your time (and the time of your staff) is valued at nothing then there is going to be a cost associated with it, even though MySQL (or other backend of choice) has no licensing cost. Whether the cost of switching is less than the cost of not switching is a question that can only be answered by actually looking at the specific scenarios involved; some cases it will be significantly cheaper overall to switch, and some may actually be more expensive overall (although these may be mostly edge cases).

I could ditch all our Windows clients and implement "free" Linux clients; they have office software and can connect to SMB shares out of the box these days, and to be honest a lot of users would barely notice the difference until they tried to find the Control Panel.

What I cannot do is change all our clients over in zero hours, and implement an immediate (and zero cost) skillset upgrade for our support staff, or even a zero cost skillset upgrade for our users (some may already be familiar with MATE / KDE / <insert desktop manager of choice> but many will not be). Those costs are the ones that stop it from being a "free" upgrade.

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